


A SEASON IN HELL

by whitesilverandmercury



Category: Attack on Titan, Shingeki no Kyojin
Genre: 50s au, Gritty, M/M, NSFW, Prostitute, dear god i'm so sorry it's been so long since i wrote something that i wrote a huge fucking ficlet, seriously please look up some of this music, this is me we're talking about, warning: i will use words considered derogatory today that were not considered so in the time period, you should know what to expect by now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-14 14:12:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4567542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitesilverandmercury/pseuds/whitesilverandmercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a partially smutty ficlet with darker old-school “white picket fence apple pie Americana” undertones, the sparkling zest of boyish sun-kissed shoulders blend with the sultry oak notes of sex hair, smoking a cigarette against the headboard, postwar patriotic inequality a primary flavor component while shedding the crisp, clean businessman image to come together with an untainted dash of hope and sexual liberation all for a soft but lingering finish nuanced with paranoia, rebellion, honesty, and the raw, beautiful resilience of human nature in an atomic era no-tell motel. recommended song pairing: born to die, lana del rey</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PART ONE

**Author's Note:**

> for @moj1t0 // 1950s au, prostitute, nsfw.

**{july 4 th, 1956.}**

He doesn’t look a thing like James Dean, but Jesus tap dancing Christ on a cracker, when he swings the motel door open, he’s a knockout in a casual T-shirt and faded, unbuttoned blue jeans. He’s fresh out of the shower and chewing on a ragged thumbnail. He smirks around his hand and lifts his brows, leans against the creaking door with one hip cocked to the side, toes curling in the dark carpet at the entryway.

“Hi, handsome,” Eren greets, looking Levi right in the eye from under a laurel of damp dark hair. “What fantastic weather for the Fourth, right?”

Levi wipes his shoes at the threshold like he’s coming home and lets Eren close the door behind him.

* * *

Levi is a very busy working man. He has an office with his name on the door. Eren’s office is a series of motel rooms. Levi usually has a preferred time slot, on a preferred day, and as far as everyone else knows, on this preferred day at this preferred time, he’s at a bar that doesn’t exist drinking off the work day. But as this is a national holiday, Eren adjusted his schedule for him. So while everyone else is having big Fourth of July get-togethers in the sparkling clean suburbs or picnicking in public parks, counting down to the fireworks, Eren staggers back against the closed motel door with a _thud_ and a frantic chuckle and opens his mouth for Levi’s tongue to swirl deeper beyond his teeth.

They are like wild animals, grabbing and groping and moaning and kissing, tangled together into one shadow in the yellow light from the sad little motel room’s only lamp.

Levi is not a big, tall man by any means, but in the hungry heat of the moment, he could hoist Eren up ho-hum and throw him to the bed if he wanted to. He doesn’t. He just grabs Eren’s ass greedily enough to lift Eren to his toes and moves off to leave a hickey on his throat.

“Hey!” Eren half laughs, half gasps for a breath now that he fully can. “Hey, come on, I’ve got a professional image to uphold just like you—”

It’s always like this. Raw, impassioned, emboldened. Pure, somehow. There’s a shade of lonely that is very pure, after all, and Eren has observed that people are somehow their truest selves around strangers.

Eren wriggles away to turn on the radio then flop down on the edge of the flimsy bed. He lands with a grunt and an eager grin to sit up on his elbows. He saw the stain and the cigarette burns in the comforter when he first got here, but he’s ignoring them. Levi crosses the room in a few smooth strides. Loosens his tie. Untucks his shirt. Eren pulls his feet up to prop on the edge of the mattress, lets his legs sag apart so that when Levi follows and presses one knee down, bed springs squeaking, Eren has room to reach forward and run his hands up Levi’s taut thighs.

Eren is not ashamed to say that only two men in the world turn him on this easily, this defenselessly, and Levi is one of those men.

He’s not sure how it happened. He does not make it a point of interest to become personally invested in any of his clients. But it’s happened.

There’s a broadcast on the radio playing all the right songs for a Fourth of July shebang. Sonny Boy Williamson sings about how he’s going to tell everything he knows while Levi’s belt buckle chatters aside and Eren fumbles him out into the open only to take him deep into his mouth.

Levi utters a low groan through his teeth. Eren knows exactly what face he’s making, even though he’s not looking because he’s got his own eyes closed and one hand on Levi’s lifted knee and the other on his dick as he works him like he knows Levi likes it. Levi’s fingers tangle into Eren’s hair. They curl, they pull a little. But it’s because Eren’s doing that _thing_ with his tongue and Eren knows it makes Levi weak in the knees, turns him into a blushing flustered horny kid again.

“You’re shameless,” Levi mutters in a low, teasing way when he starts tugging Eren’s pants off and sees he’s naked beneath.

 _Shameless_. Eren doesn’t know what it’s really supposed to mean. He’s just ready. Practiced, even. But it’s not very often he turns back into a blushing flustered horny kid, too, and if he’s not proud of being shameless, what else should he be?

He rolls over to straddle Levi’s hips and get him inside him before too much of the fresh spit goes tacky.

Eren shifts around a little, tries to find the right angle to ease the initial shock of penetration.

Levi’s got his legs off the edge of the bed and his socked feet planted on the floor. His belt buckle is cold against naked skin. He curls forward from his back to his elbows, and then all the way up to hold Eren steady by the waist and get into a nice, slow rhythm.

Eren holds fast at the open collar of Levi’s work shirt, waiting for the spark in all his nerves when Levi hits that one sweet spot. No, not from this angle. Not going to happen. But Levi is hot and hard, throbbing inside him, and Eren lets the pleasure infect him like a fever. He can’t help it. Levi is gorgeous. Levi is never mean or violent. He’s polite, patient. Shy, sometimes. Levi Ackerman—yes, Eren took a peek through Levi’s wallet once—is dark and handsome and disarmingly charming in a dangerous way, sarcastic but gentlemanly, cynical but kind, dreamy but secretly tortured.

“Fuck—fuck—” Eren whines, and half of it is habit.

 _Thud. Thud._ That’s the headboard already. They switch positions. Levi peels off both his shirts and his good slacks before climbing back onto the bed again, and Eren’s worried that the way Levi clutches the headboard and the way the headboard knocks back against the peeling wallpapered wall is going to smash Levi’s fingers. Levi doesn’t seem troubled, though. He’s more concerned with how deep he can get now, slamming in, in, in, hard enough that Eren bounces beneath him. His toes curl again, hanging in the air with his thighs propped up at Levi’s hips like that. He needs to grab something so he reaches up and holds onto Levi’s arms. There it is, sweet spot. He’s sticky with sweat. It’s July. It was a warm day. The muscles of his middle burn from the crunching. He wants Levi to tear him apart, he wants to feel it in his bones, Levi’s hips are the pestle and Eren’s body is the mortar and he loves the way Levi crushes him into the very pulse of it—

“Harder! Harder, fuck! Come on, Captain, let’s go—”

“ _Shit_ , Eren—”

_Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud._

“Flip over—”

“Yes, sir,” Eren chirps, and it dissolves into a devious laugh which further crumbles into a string of grunts and gasps and cracking, rattling groans as Levi mounts him again. Levi slaps his ass affectionately. And then he runs his hand up to grab a fistful of the pillow Eren’s biting, like he wants to feel Eren’s breath on his skin as Eren cries out his name.

Levi’s sex is so slick, so thick. But he’s almost done. Eren knows when Levi’s at the finish line by now—because while he comes hard inside him, he also reaches down between Eren’s legs to squeeze and grope and run his fingers over the sticky pre-ejaculate beading at the flushed tip of Eren’s cock.

“Fuck me—hahh—give it to me, handsome—yes—yes— _fuck!_ ”

_Thud. Thud. Thud._

He feels like coming all over Levi’s fingers is bad business. But he can’t help it.

* * *

Levi only dresses enough to go out to his Cadillac and fetch the bottle of bourbon from the trunk as fireworks go off in the distance. Safe in the dim, stuffy motel again, he goes through his wallet and throws a few tens down on the bed. Eren’s not on the bed. Eren’s opening the motel window and settling down with a fresh cigarette, leaning with folded arms propped on the windowsill.

“Forty, right?” Levi husks.

“Forty,” Eren confirms. “You don’t have to leave right away. I have no more clients tonight.”

“If I’ve got some bourbon to spare, have you got some smokes?” Levi murmurs, pouring two glasses on the bedside table.

Eren holds up the battered pack of cigarettes.

It’s Johnnie Ray and the Four Lads on the radio now. The first round of fireworks is mostly done. Cars blow by up on the freeway. People, going home. People, on joy rides. People living the good American life, wholesome contributions to society who don’t hide in motels getting their frantic stones off with a young man who makes forty bucks more than once a week while others get jumped by the police or committed for sexual masochism. And Johnnie Ray sings brokenly, _Don’t you sometimes think it’s real?_

Eren eventually stands to put his jeans back on, hopping a little to get them up to his hips. He puts the money in his back pocket and joins Levi on the bed.

 _Give it to me, handsome_ —

“You don’t have to talk so dirty to me every time, you know,” Levi mutters.

They lay far away from each other like touching in any fashion so soon after climax and transaction is highly inappropriate, or at least dangerous, a field of emotional landmines like shame and self-hatred and remorse and disgusted shock at having succumbed to such passionate, personal acts with a stranger who somehow means something very important after so many nights of seemingly inconsequential sex.

Eren lights another cigarette and leans back against the headboard, closing his eyes. He hums to the song on the radio.

“Sorry,” he finally murmurs, opening his hazel eyes just enough to pierce right into Levi. Levi has to look away. God but he is a mess, to be so swept away when the rest of his country hates nothing more than the damnable moral bankruptcy of fags (except maybe Communists).

“How’s your honey?” Levi asks. “Not spending the Fourth with him, I see.”

Eren utters a startled little sound somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. “Don’t ruin the magic, asking me that.” But Levi is certainly not so far in denial that he pretends to have Eren all to himself. Most of the time. Eren heaves a sigh. He says, “He’s at his folks’ place in Snohomish for their big party and I’m not allowed on the property anymore after last year.”

“Last year?”

“They put two and two together.”

“They found out you’re…”

“A Commie, yup.”

Levi cuts Eren a look. Eren returns the glance with raised brows. He laughs again. It’s just his irreverent humor.

“A queer,” he amends. “A homosexual. I corrupt their son, don’t you know? Anyway, he told them he’s dating some half-Japanese girl he goes to school with. Funny, right? They’re more okay with that than having me around—a good, American man.” Eren falls quiet for a moment. Then he shrugs and summarizes, “Jean’s good. How’s your wife?”

Levi doesn’t answer. Instead he reaches over to pinch Eren’s side vindictively. Eren swats his hand away, but he smiles.

“Your man’s a lucky man,” Levi murmurs, and it’s the end of that conversation. Eren is shameless, but that doesn’t mean he wants to talk all night about life outside of work. And neither does Levi. Sometimes it just makes him feel a little better to know Eren is a real person like him.

Eren has his pants unbuttoned yet, and rolled up a few inches past the ankle. The silky places around his eyes look sick and tired even with the lamp off. Moonlight and the neon glow from the motel sign over the parking lot spill in through the open window and pool on the carpet. Levi loves the way Eren’s body moves when he breathes. Supple, but slender, and tightly-carved like a marble god with those smooth shoulders and sun-kissed skin. He is a man, sure, barely by the law, but the purity of youth clings to his edges in the most haunting way. Eren is not an individual; Eren is an irresistible experience. He’s a raw, Dionysian dream and Levi worships it.

A round of delayed fireworks goes off somewhere not too far away. Eren jumps. He laughs at himself. Levi jumps too, but he doesn’t laugh. He hates fireworks.

“Why?” Eren asks. But he seems to answer his own question before Levi can. “When did you serve?”

Levi watches the glow swell at the end of his own cigarette as he takes a gentle drag. “Last two years of the war.”

“I just barely escaped the draft. Flat feet.”

“So did I this time—age.” Levi lays on his side with his head propped in one hand and his heels on the jostled pillow. He wags one foot, crossed with the other at the ankle. It smells like sex in the room now—rich, heady, sweet. The bruise of guilt is heavy on Levi tonight. He says, “Don’t you get tired of this?”

“I never get tired of you,” Eren hums, flashing Levi that patented look of licentious rebellion. He reaches over to drum his fingers up the side of Levi’s ankle like a spider. It’s ticklish and annoying; Levi’s foot twitches away.

“Stop.” Levi raises his brows. “I want to know the real answer.”

The playful smirk falls fast from Eren’s face and he glares at Levi, like he finds it distasteful for him to pry. “Yeah,” he finally says, but flatly. “Sometimes.”

“Then why do you do it?” Levi asks.

Eren snorts on his drink. His face pinches, nose wrinkling like a rabbit’s. Levi can imagine why, after a mouthful of bourbon. “Do what,” he sputters, not entirely defiant, “let a bunch of bored, married, repressed, greedy men go to town with me like they can’t ever with their wives, then pretend they aren’t monsters when they take their families to church on Sunday?”

Apparently the look on Levi’s face at that is enough to elicit a triumphant grin out of Eren. But then Eren just _stops_. For a moment Levi is afraid he’s even stopped breathing, staring at him like that. But he moves, slowly, to tap cigarette ash into the crystal tray by the lamp and he looks at Levi, saying in a voice like he’s launching a beat poem, “I’m so obsessed with the way foreign bodies invade my body.”

Levi waits, because the hush is heavy with unspoken words. But Eren doesn’t say anything more, just stares at Levi but does not really seem to see him.

After a long moment, he elaborates, thankfully. “I’m good at it, so why not? You know, it’s not all about drag queens and fairies, it’s about—it’s about the cult of masculinity, Sapphic friendship—”

Levi toasts with what bourbon is left in his glass. “Getting molested at a prep school back in New York.”

Eren meets his toast with a _clink_ of the tumblers. “Or Catholic school.”

Levi draws long and hard off his cigarette, looking away. He’s not happy to hear that. But he is happy he’s not the only one. “Birds of a feather flock together,” he husks.

“You know,” Eren sighs, “the Greeks used to have lovers on the side. They understood. We praise the Greeks for everything else except that, isn’t that messed up? Most people don’t understand sex. But I do. Look, we’re all capitalists, aren’t we? Supply and demand, the American way. And the money’s good when people’ve got repressed desires they don’t understand.” Eren issues a cheeky salute.

“Dear God, you’re _proud_ , aren’t you?” Levi smirks faintly. He parries, “My desires aren’t repressed.” Except he’s lying, otherwise he wouldn’t be here, desperate to exorcise his demons so he can carry on as a normal man again tomorrow.  

Eren points to Levi’s wedding ring without a second thought. “Really?”

Levi narrows his eyes, throwing back the last of his drink so he can pour another. Eren’s never asked about the ring before, but Levi’s not dumb enough to believe he’s never noticed it. “‘People don’t like the truth because they don’t want their _illusions_ destroyed.’”

“Nietzsche,” Eren says. “He’s a quack. What’s the illusion, your marriage or your infidelity?”

“Aren’t you a well-read little whore?” Levi hums kindly. Eren doesn’t take offense; he gives Levi one of those damnably sexy smiles of his. The one with dimples, and a provocative sidelong glance. Levi shakes his head slowly, finding his spot on the bed again.

“I love her,” he says gravely. “I do. I wouldn’t have married her if I didn’t love her. But what—what they don’t tell you as a kid is that sometimes love isn’t enough. And things get tough, and…” He avoids Eren’s eyes. He draws a deep breath and releases it through his nose, mouth pressed in a grim line. “I don’t know why.”

Eren fiddles with a loose thread in the seam of his jeans. “Do you have a house with a picket fence?”

Levi nods.

“So do my parents,” Eren says.

“How are your parents?”

“Oblivious as always.”

Listen to them, chatting like this is some weekend lovers’ tryst and not a point of sale. Are they mad, or—how much longer until they end up caring for each other more than they are obligated?

Eren chews on his next words but Levi doesn’t know why until he says them. He breathes in like he’s waking from a good nap and he murmurs, “You’re a good man, you know. You really, really are.”

This plucks at something sore and sensitive in Levi’s soul. Maybe the part that doesn’t feel like such a good man. Because when he was younger, he didn’t think anything was wrong with him. He didn’t think anything was wrong with him until people told him something was wrong with him, actually. _Immoral_ , they said. And, _Sexual deviance_. And Erwin said, _I love you_.

Levi throws back a long swallow of bourbon and clears his throat but his voice is still rough from the burn as he mutters, “You don’t know anything about me, sweetheart.”

Eren flashes him a dark glance. He counters, “You can learn a lot about a person by the way they act in a motel room when they’re paying someone to love them.”

Levi stops wagging his foot and meets Eren’s eyes over his drink. “I don’t need to pay anyone to love me,” he says. “And I don’t have repressed desires, either. I know who I am. I know _what_ I am. But I also know what I have to do to get by in this world. Not everyone can be as brave as you.”

A shadow eclipses Eren’s face. He gawks at Levi for a second, like he’s betrayed by that statement. He leans back against the headboard and stares dully over at the open window. He smokes. Gently, slowly, like a star in old Hollywood films. Barely closing his mouth on the paper, barely taking the drag, breathing out a stream of velvety gray and cradling the cigarette between his first and second knuckles instead of pinched at the tip. He only holds it like that to stub it out in the crystal. His eyes are bright, but distant. His voice is tiny and fragile like shattered glass when he finally looks at Levi again and edges out, “Don’t make me sad. Don’t you make me cry, jerk.”

Levi is lost. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing.” Eren points a finger, decisively. “You’re a good man.”

“Okay,” Levi humors him. “I’m a good man.”

“You’re also really talkative tonight,” Eren says around a new cigarette, snapping his lighter shut and offering it to Levi.

“Maybe I just want to get to know the man I’m paying to relieve me of _repressed desires_ ,” Levi counters.

“That’s not how this works and you know it. Remember?”

Levi lights his cigarette and tosses the lighter back, looking away with a frown dangerously close to a pout. Grown men shouldn’t pout. Yes, he knows that’s not how this works. He remembers. He remembers how bad things were in the bedroom with his wife and he remembers Eren six months ago on the corner of First and Yesler, under the strung-up lights and the trees dancing in the evening breeze. Eren and his bad boy jeans, a baseball tee, a bomber jacket and a busted lip. He remembers. _Say you’re mine and I’m yours. We’re happy. Everything’s peachy. Nothing else matters_. Inside some shitty room somewhere just off the freeway, Eren, the vagabond angel, with those big knowing eyes. _Yes, sir. You ready for a walk on the wild side, handsome?_

“You just want to know we share the same sins.” Eren smiles cheerily. “Birds of a feather, right?”

Yes, maybe Levi just wants to know they share the same sins. Can he be blamed? He has a wife and the prostitute has a boyfriend yet they’re both here, colliding in a tangle of raw, wild desire. One for payment, the other for penitence, pretending the world is the kind of place where the happiness in coming together actually lasts. No judgment, no shame, no secrets. Levi burns to know if this lucky Jean fellow knows about Eren’s chosen profession. Something smarter in him settles for making inferences. That’s the kind of world they live in, after all.

“Do you think this is wrong?” Levi murmurs.

Eren looks at him, brow knotted. “What do you mean?”

Levi gestures around the room, but mostly he means the two of them. How this young man with bourbon-bright eyes and unbuttoned jeans knows him better than his own wife. _Say you’re mine and I’m yours._

Eren shrugs. “Love is complicated,” he says. “Sex is a lot easier to understand than love. And that’s the problem.” It’s his turn to quote, apparently. He says, “‘Everything in the world is about sex, except sex.’”

Levi issues a bored nod. “‘Sex is about power,’” he finishes, and lifts his eyes slowly to meet Eren’s from the foot of the bed. “Oscar Wilde.”

“I’m a well-read whore,” Eren echoes, raising his brows.

Levi inclines his chin, peering down his nose at Eren. “Is that what all this is about? Do you feel powerful, being a dirty secret for God knows how many strangers?”

“Of course I do,” Eren says. “This isn’t _only_ about getting away from the wife for a night. This is about feeling normal. Right? You know, love and sex are not synonymous. You can have sex without love and love without sex and—and there’s nothing wrong with that. But you can’t deny human nature. That’s where the power’s at.”

“Well, why aren’t you out there changing the world with ideas like that, you bohemian little wunderkind?” Levi hums. It’s patronizing, of course. In a kind way. He moves his feet over to curl his toes against Eren’s hip. He wants to let him know he’s not trying to start a brooding session. He just doesn’t want to dwell too long on the truth in that little speech. _Not about getting away from the wife. Feeling normal._

Eren peers at Levi sagely, lips parted. He takes his last sip of bourbon slowly then holds his glass out for more. He says, “I am changing the world. Baudelaire says—and I’m paraphrasing—‘The invincible hunger for lovemaking in man comes from his horror of solitude.’ We’re all born to die, you know, but if I can be what someone needs—even just for a night—then I’ve changed their world. Haven’t I?”

Levi isn’t quite sure what to say. He didn’t expect Eren to have such a profound philosophy ready to follow his hedonistic perspective. “You’re very slick, or very naïve,” he suggests. “Or you read too much and have an extraordinarily good memory.”

Eren breaks into a devious smile. But there’s something in his eyes that is ultimately softer and more wistful. “You caught me. I’m studying literature at the university.”

On the radio now, there’s some jingle playing to remind Americans to duck and cover, and don’t forget your masks.

Levi sits up roughly, throwing his cigarette in the crystal tray. He sets his bourbon down hard on the bedside table. Eren looks startled, puzzled, but when he realizes Levi is only pouncing to cover him in quick, covetous kisses, he throws his head back and laughs, and everything in the world is right again. Eren goes down without a fight until they’re tangled together, nuzzling with their feet on the pillows and their heads at the edge of the bed.

“You still sad?” Levi demands.

“No,” Eren vows. “Promise.”

God damn, every time Eren smiles, it’s another Roman nail crucifying Levi to his fate. There’s that usual spark back in his gaze, that contagious humor of his again, and thank God because Levi can only handle so much of his hidden darkness at once. Even if it was his fault tonight.

“Just so you know,” Levi says, combing his hand through Eren’s hair idly, “you’re not the first man I’ve ever gone to bed with. In fact, I loved a man once.”

“Oh?” Eren smirks weakly, cocking a brow. “And what happened?”

“I came back from Europe for Princeton and Petra, but Commander Smith liked the army too much.”

* * *

_You don’t know anything about me._

_Sometimes love is not enough._

Eren feels like someone has knocked the wind out of him and it won’t come back. Levi’s fingers swirl at the dip of his tailbone and shivers dance in double time down his spine. He lied. He’s still a little sad.    

Levi is a good, good man, but Eren isn’t so sure about himself. Good men don’t make money off other men’s private pains, the oppression, the perverted animal urge manifestations of natural inclinations. He didn’t lie about _that_ to Levi, no. Men pay him not only for an unquestioning bed but for a ritual, a rite, an effigy to sodomize, a body in which to bury their secrets, one randy shove at a time. But that’s not why Eren does this.

He doesn’t know why he does this. He’s broken, too, he fears.

_I don’t need to pay someone to love me._

“What’s wrong?” Levi murmurs, tracing the line of Eren’s nose with his warm lips. It tickles. Eren smiles meekly. He rolls away and sits up at the edge of the bed, leaning forward against his knees.

Levi sits up on his elbow behind him. He says, “I’m sorry, you know what, I shouldn’t have asked you so many personal questions.”

Eren scoffs, not unkindly, throwing Levi a glance over his shoulder.

Eren remembers when Levi entered his clientele, too. He remembers the street corner downtown. He remembers the heartache shining bright in Levi’s gray eyes, the resolute line of his mouth. Silvery adrenaline alight in his touch, which was gentle but greedy. Like a rusty lock finally giving way to the right key. That’s what repressed desires do to a man. Eren remembers leaning down at the open passenger-side window of Levi’s Cadillac. _I’ve seen you at The Garden before._ He remembers Levi’s hungry eyes. _Cat got your tongue, Captain?_ But what Eren remembers the most, and will never, ever forget, is the way Levi looked with his tie crooked and his suitcoat on the floor, chest heaving and shoulders drawn. The way he lifted his chin, clinging to some semblance of pride, but his eyes were vulnerable and frantic as he said, _I’m paying you to say you’re mine and I’m yours and we’re happy and everything’s peachy and nothing else matters_.

“Did I upset you?” Levi asks flatly, bed springs squeaking as he sits up more.

“No,” Eren murmurs, heart pounding.

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not.” Eren leaves the bed and paces for a second, then goes over to turn the radio up. It’s late enough that most of the rock and roll is gone, leaving slow, mellow ballads in its wake.

_Oh yes, I’m the great pretender, adrift in a world of my own…_

Maybe it’s a mistake or maybe it’s just Eren’s design. Maybe his moral compass is defective, jammed. Eren doesn’t hate Levi for saying he doesn’t have to pay someone to love him. Levi is absolutely right. He would love Levi even if Levi didn’t pay him.

Eren turns around, finally. He says, “Hey, let’s dance! I want to dance. I love this song.”

Levi gives him a look like this is a ridiculous suggestion. He acquiesces for the rest of The Platters, at least, a sad, half-hearted joke of a waltz. Then he just sits on the edge of the bed with his glass of bourbon and watches Eren dance by himself to late-night rock and roll. Eren laughs and staggers and sings and bumps into Levi’s knee. Levi catches his wrist. Eren trips to a halt but he yields instantly to Levi’s kisses. His hands find their way to Levi’s throat and he sinks slowly down onto his lap, kissing back. Levi tastes like good whiskey and sweet skin. Maybe they’ll make love again. For forty bucks, it’d be Levi’s money’s worth. But maybe they won’t.

* * *

“This is the last time,” Levi says as he buttons his shirt up, loose tie tossed over one shoulder. Eren’s not worried.

“You always say that,” he reminds as Levi checks his wristwatch in the dim light before making his way to his car.

“We’ll see,” Levi concedes, raising his brows.

He stands with his hands in his pockets and just looks at Eren from the parking lot. His eyes are hooded, dark. But there’s a little curve to his mouth like an honest smile. The motel sign towers above, behind him. The neon is off for now, abstract sharply-spiked swirl of a “star” peppered with snoozing bare bulb sockets.

“Make it home safe,” Eren says, giving the hood of Levi’s car a hard pat or two. “Tell your wife your car broke down on the way back from the bar and finally a good Samaritan stopped to help you.”

“I’ll add it to my list of lies,” Levi sighs.

Eren watches him leave, leaning on the motel door. Dawn is creeping up over this stretch of road, turning the sky a faint, silky purple where the pine trees spear up in the distance. Eren closes his eyes. He stretches his arms to the sky then lets them sag to fold idly behind his head. He breathes in the cool air, shaking off the night like a flower shaking off morning dew. It doesn’t take much. Nights with Levi don’t leave him quite as dazed as others do.

The whole world feels like a ghost town this early in the morning.

It’s not much later that a pickup rumbles out of the trees, coasting towards the motel. Under the looming unlit sign, it swings into the parking lot. Its familiar patches of rust are a sight for sore eyes, and so is the hunk swinging the door open as he kills the engine. Sunrise is pale and sullen this morning and Jean slouches with one foot propped up on the driver’s side door, looking at Eren through the open window.

“Hey, schmuck,” Jean greets in the same voice a soldier boy might use for, _How you doing, beautiful?_ “Look at you in that college sweater.”

All the rotten tension drains out of Eren’s body and he smiles stupidly. The bourbon’s fading, for the most part. He’s already gotten his things out of the motel room. He leaves the key on the bed and hoists his bag to his shoulder, wandering across the pavement to meet Jean at the truck.

“Hi,” he finally says back, and leans through the open window for a quick, tender kiss no one will see. He can smell a night of whiskey on Jean’s breath, too.

He throws his bag on the floor of the cab and swings up to sit shotgun as Jean restarts the engine. They pull out of the parking lot to blow back down the road towards town.

“Thanks for picking me up,” Eren says. Jean’s been up all night too, more than likely, shooting the shit with his dad long after the Fourth of July party wound down. Eren knows how that goes. He used to be part of it. Now he’s the reason Jean’s folks don’t have the apartment address, lest there be a surprise visit and they drop in on Eren, not exactly the traditional housewife, lounging around with no shirt on, reading Rimbaud, Homer, Tolstoy.

“How was your night?” Jean asks—almost hesitantly, just almost.

 _He’s a lucky man_.

 _Don’t make me sad_.

Eren stares at Jean as he drives and it obviously makes Jean uneasy because he tries to split his attention between the road and Eren. He chuckles. He raises his brows, shifting gears roughly. But then the smile fades and his glance sharpens. Gorgeous Jean, Eren’s partner in crime, with his tousled ash-blond hair and his white shirt and his party slacks and his protective, possessive eyes.

“What?” he demands, because Eren hasn’t answered his question. “What happened? Do I need to kick someone’s ass?”

“No, punk,” Eren murmurs, laughing softly to himself.

“What’d you make?”

“Forty.”

“Only forty?” Jean slams the truck into higher gear and the morning wind feels good on Eren’s face through the open window as they speed up.

“Jesus, Jean,” Eren retorts, throwing him a dirty look. “I had one guy last night.”

Jean is apologetic. He reaches over, swirling the fingers of his free hand up Eren’s neck and into his hair. It makes him swerve a little so Eren pushes his hand back. He hates this truck but it’s not like Jean can take his little Harley to his parents’ house; they hate motorcycles.

“Sorry,” Jean mumbles through a yawn.

Eren settles back, propping his feet up on the dashboard. “Did your mom give you hell for not ironing your pants before the party?”

Jean chuckles, scrubbing his free hand down his face now. “Yeah, and for wearing a leather jacket.”

“I need coffee,” Eren grumbles.

Jean’s quiet for a moment. He doesn’t say anything until he pulls off the road, into the shadows of a cluster of pine trees. The keys chatter coolly as he turns the truck off and slouches low in the driver’s seat, propping his head in one hand and casting Eren a sideways glance. He waggles his brows.

“I need coffee, too,” he says and God does Eren love the way he bites his middle finger knuckle when he’s up to something, “with lots of sugar.”

Eren snorts, smiling crookedly. He knows what sugar Jean wants. He maneuvers his way around the gear shift and across the cab of the truck, climbing onto Jean’s lap. It’s a little cramped between the roof and the steering wheel, but they fit together perfectly.

They always do.

Jean’s hands slide into his back pockets to hold him in place and Eren folds down against him, turns his face so he can catch Jean’s mouth in a lazy, enamored kiss. The kiss becomes another. And another. Cramped, but cozy.

After a while, about the time Eren’s mouth feels really raw after so much kissing again, Jean just laces his fingers at the small of his back and cradles him there against his chest. He says, “They want to give me the house out there. After they—you know, die.”

Eren rests his head on Jean’s shoulder, tracing the line of his jaw as he thinks about this. About the vegetable garden out there, the chickens, the painted shutters—the picket fence. Jean could do his scrap metal art all day long in the backyard if he wanted to and Eren could just sit on the porch swing and smoke a cigarette and drink a beer and watch him and God knows Eren’s not great in the kitchen, but they could go for joy rides on the Harley as fast as they please on the stretch of road that’s not dirt. And Eren loves the city, he loves their apartment, he loves the school, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe it would feel a little normal.

But maybe this is the normal in which they inevitably belong—him and Jean, on the fringes of society, doing what they have to do to get by.

 _Not everyone can be as brave as you_.

“Well,” Eren mumbles, “your parents aren’t kicking the bucket any time soon, so.”

Jean taps Eren’s thigh to signal he should get out of the way so he can start driving again. Back on the road, a quiet falls in the cab. It’s not entirely uncomfortable. Eren leans on his side of the truck and puts his hand out the window to let it float on the rush of air there. Finally, he stretches out so that his knee bumps Jean’s.

“Hey,” he says. “I still need coffee and I’m starving. Next diner we see, let’s stop—I’ll buy you breakfast.”

“I need to sleep before work, you know,” Jean complains.

“Well, you’re sick,” Eren decides for him. “You can explain tomorrow when you go into the shop. Let’s just get breakfast and have a lazy day together.”

“You’re such a brat,” Jean hums. “Why do I love you, again?”

Eren smiles. He doesn’t have a real answer. Jean doesn’t have a real answer. He’s teasing, he’s flirting. Eren flirts back, “Because I make more money than you, big boy.”

“Shut up.” Jean grins, sleepily. He gives Eren’s knee a little shove. “That diner? Up there?”

“Yeah, babe.”

_Sometimes love is not enough._

Eren understands sex, but love is a different story. After all, there are only two men in the world for whom Eren dares to believe in the word—Levi, who Eren loves very much, and Jean Kirschtein, who Eren is painfully in love with.

 

**{END part one.}  
**


	2. PART DEUX

_To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked?_

_What hearts shall I break? What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?_

 — Rimbaud

 

**{1944 – 1945.}**

The first time Levi pays a prostitute, he is in Paris.

Four days after von Choltitz surrenders in the Hôtel Meurice, they—the Americans—will march in a victory parade down to the famed Arc de Triomphe, and never in his life has Levi imagined he’d see such a sight. _Paris_. Then again, he never imagined a war like this, either. There are still machine guns chattering erratically around corners and alleys, but there is no real urban warfare. No, the French rip themselves free of the Nazis, ignoring the field commander, sure, but rolling in on American tanks and GM trucks. De Gaulle rallies the city with a grand speech from the Hôtel de Ville. The City of Lights is alive like it hasn’t been alive since its occupation, and while the Army stations in a Parisian park for the night, of course they take part in the celebration, too.

Erwin says, “Come on—when in Rome, right?”

And Levi’s already warm from whiskey, grinning through the spinning lights of a liberated city. “We’re not in Rome, we’re in Paris,” he argues.

The _maison_ is in astoundingly good condition for having just been liberated. Miss Viviénne with her deep red lips and limp curls takes them to a top-floor room practically encrusted in layers of old Art Nouveau trends—tear drop crystals dangling off lamp shades, enamel on the wall panels chipping blue and pink paint, a big four poster bed with a tasseled Oriental throw across the head board.

“ _C’est combien_?” Erwin asks, looking all sorts of gloriously tousled in his cleanest uniform.

Everyone knows how the French rule the kingdom of sex, and nobody questions triumphant soldiers in a brothel.

Thankfully, Erwin knows more French than Levi does.

They pay the prostitute to leave them alone so they can come together in sloppy, love-drunk secretive American fashion.

It’s just the two of them and the bed and the soaring spirits of victory—one victory, but a victory that will drive them on to the next, the next, and eventually the last, just like the fact that they might die before they see the final victory drives them together in a rough, reckless embrace charged with battlefield passion.

No, not battlefield passion—boyish passion, the passion of hope, the passion of impulse, the passion of brotherhood and feeling alive when surrounded by death.

Before Levi knows it, they’re on the bed rocking together already. They’re too impatient to undress all the way. “Fuck—” Levi rakes his fingers through Erwin’s dirty blond hair. He doesn’t know if it’s coming loose of the hair wax because of his clutching hands or because of the way Erwin’s moving with such a powerful rhythm already, body crushing Levi to the lumpy mattress like he wants them to become one.

Erwin drags Levi’s pants to his knees, dog tags dancing on his naked chest. Levi doesn’t care how it hurts at first when Erwin pries into him, hot and swollen, _he wants it_. He needs it. The pain grounds him. They are warriors like the fairy tales and the myths he read as a child—nothing but innocence and instinct, bloodshed and lovemaking at the whims of the gods. After all, it is Erwin he sees when he moves out at the command, splashing through mud or debris. It is Erwin’s approval he craves, Erwin he wants to make proud. It is Erwin for whom he fights. And he knows it’s selfish—unpatriotic, even—this obsession.

But a man does what he must to survive.

Erwin is so strong, so broad, so warm, so alive, and Levi has never been so besotted, never more eager to be conquered, never longed to so completely give himself to another.

“I love you,” Erwin moans, clutching Levi hard enough to bruise with those wide soldier’s hands. “I love you,” he says, coming hard. “Fuck— _fuck_ —”

Levi sees stars.

Any sort of response is torn to shreds by a whining groan as he follows suit, spilling forth between Erwin’s groping fingers.

He is new to this. He is unsure of these waters. And a man does what he must to get out alive.

A month before Berlin, Levi has two bullets removed from his side and a following infection keeps him delirious for two long, desperate weeks. When the fever finally breaks, he stirs awake to a cluster of English nurses sobbing together at the window. “It’s over!” they say. “Berlin is ours!”

Major General Kenny Ackerman brings honorable discharge papers and alone in the stench and ringing silence of the army hospital, he says, “I could’ve given you a blue. I didn’t. You’re just a dumb fucking kid. Go home. Go to school. Get married.”

In May, demobilization sends Erwin to the Pacific.

* * *

**{1956.}**

Autumn is damp and gray for the most part, but splashed through with the golds and reds of fallen leaves. They blanket the matching lawns of the cookie-cutter neighborhood like a posh new carpet as Eren runs his fingers over the teeth-like tips of the white picket fence at the perimeter of the yard.

He feels sorely out of place here, but maybe only because he knows. Maybe all the neighbors think he looks normal, if they see him at all, peeking out through dogwood lace curtains or front door peepholes—that he’s just home from school visiting, home for a family dinner and some television, maybe, looking all too dangerous in his bomber jacket and blue jeans.

“Hey,” Levi calls, car keys jangling as he swings open the front door of the house behind the picket fence. Obviously, he shares the same fears. “Will you get in here before anyone spots you, already?”

Eren hurries to follow Levi inside, smirking faintly to himself. He can’t help it. He thrives on the fragility of scandal.

* * *

He’s at least wearing a sweater under his jacket so he doesn’t feel too underdressed, waiting for Levi in the family room with his feet tucked up under him on the sofa. It’s warm in Levi’s house; it’s cozy and clean, and feels very homey. Levi’s got the radio on and Eren nurses a beer while Levi buzzes around in the kitchen.

“So your wife’s out of town, huh?” he feels it’s appropriate to pry.

“Yeah,” Levi calls back noncommittally.

“But you’re doing fine in the kitchen, aren’t you?” Eren hums.

Levi strolls to a stop in the kitchen doorway, leaning there for a long swallow of his own beer, over which he cocks a brow at Eren as if to challenge the meaning of that statement.

“Can’t I help?” Eren asks for a third time.

“No,” Levi says resolutely.

“Not even if I wear an apron and nothing else?” Eren teases.

Levi gives him an impatient but regretfully amused look and disappears back into the kitchen with the new electric dishwasher and wall refrigerator.

Eren snoops. His gaze roams the clusters of family photographs on the walls, the side tables. Levi’s wife is a beautiful woman—lustrous curls, round eyes, a classic beauty. If he thinks hard enough about it, he might be able to smell her perfume. He runs his hands over the chintz sofa cushions, wondering which side she usually sits on. He tries not to look at the photographs from the wedding, or the flowers on the mantle that are probably her decorative touch. She seems to exist in a different universe. She’s a ghost. She’s the bottles of prescription Miltown on the counter when Eren goes to use the bathroom, the pills he shakes out and slips into his hip pocket to steal.

This isn’t just a house call, and they both know it. They’re playing house.  

But Eren is not complaining.

Dinner for two is reheated corned beef with potatoes and beets and for the first half of it, there’s nothing but the scrape of silverware against china or a quiet swallow to betray anyone’s in the dining nook at all. The curtains are all closed. Only a few lights are on. The radio still plays from the family room, an upbeat jazzy sort of ballad.

Eren slides his eyes up the length of the small table to observe Levi. He is not accustomed to seeing him outside of his business dress, after all, unless half-naked counts. But this is homey casual; this is man of the house comfortable. Flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up, loose dark hair. Khakis and slip-on shoes. Wristwatch. Wedding ring.

Eren fidgets in the seat across from Levi. He clears his throat. It feels sharp and abrupt, like the tight, tense silence was glass and he’s just kicked a hole through it. Flustered, because he’s not used to getting the housewife treatment when a client says they want it at home instead of in a motel (which in and of itself is not exactly a common occurrence, anyway), he struggles not to avoid Levi’s eyes as he says, “How was your day?”

Look at this, the apple pie, white picket fence American dream.

His heart’s pounding at the back of his throat.

Levi shrugs. “It was long. Yours?”

Eren feels like he can’t breathe. The domesticity is so foreign yet so familiar, so tantalizing—and their bold disruption of its normal patterns is deliciously ironic. What next, will Levi sit back to watch Eren iron all his shirts for him, too? He needs to remember he is still a professional, and this is still work. But he can’t figure out if Levi wants to pretend this is his normal or if Levi just wants Eren to feel normal. On the one hand, that’s incredibly sweet. On the other, tragic.

“Can I help you unwind, handsome?” Eren murmurs, casting Levi a flirtatious glance.

Levi smirks dryly around his drink. “You might be able to,” he flirts back.

There it is; that’s the game Eren knows. He drains the last of his beer and sets the bottle down hard on the table. He leans back in his chair. It creaks a little. He fixes Levi with a suggestive look, working the flirt into every inch of his body.

“So,” he demands, “you want me to blow you right here in the kitchen, or do you want me on the couch? I haven’t even gotten the full tour yet, Levi. Why don’t you take me in your bedroom?”

Levi throws down his dinner napkin and shoots Eren a dark but titillated glance, still smiling that grim, crooked smile. He mutters, “Aren’t you clever with that double entendre?”

He gestures for Eren to follow him deeper into the house.

* * *

**{1949 onward.}**

It starts with love letters from a teacher at the Holy St. Francis of Assisi Catholic school for boys, standing in the bruised light of an overcast day that spills in cool and silvery through a broad, multipaned window in the upper hall, lips murmuring like repeating the rosaries, murmuring over the words as his scarf dangles from one hand and the other holds the small, handwritten communiqué. The whole hall is silent. The world is silent. It’s not even raining. It’s always too cold in Holy St. Francis. But Eren’s whole body heats up inside his wrinkled charcoal-gray pants, his school crest-emblazoned sweater, his Carhartt jacket—heats up in embarrassment, in shock, in confusion, in a darkly curious self-awareness. He reads the letter again.

_Angel — ‘it is a marvel that those POUTY lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music & song than for the madness of kissing’ — I must alert you to the cavern of unmined beauty in your soul — you should be made to take heed: you are advertising something very specific, darling boy, something I would like to teach you, if you’d let me, you perfect Saint — There is a Secret Garden, a paradise on Earth, the keys to which only a chosen few of us hold, those who understand, & it is this secret I wish to share with you, a secret you can’t tell anyone, they won’t understand, but I know you will understand for ‘all the bright sword-play of your wit’ & saintliness in your heart, & I should mourn if you were to fall into peril, swimming in these deep waters out of your own dangerous genius instead of accepting my experienced instruction…_

“Mr. Jäger!” Sister Braus snaps from the open door of Eren’s first classroom of the day. “Have you seen a holy vision or do you just presume that punctuality does not apply to you?”

“Sorry, Sister—yes, Sister,” Eren whispers, mouth dry. He folds the letter and tucks it into his shirt before anyone can ask to see it.

— _you are advertising something very specific, darling boy —_

The fourth letter finally begs for a private meeting or at least a response.

Eren meets Mr. Blunte in the dark, secluded school gallery and in the furthest back corner, under a massive painting of St. Sebastian, he lets Mr. Blunte put his hands all over him. Up his sweater, down his pants. He tastes like cherry lozenges when he finally kisses Eren on the mouth. His glasses bump Eren’s nose. Eren doesn’t know how he already knows what to do next. Maybe it’s just that God made him this way, and prayer is only practice for being on your knees.

Eren is suddenly very conscious of his own sensuality and what he can do with it.

It starts with Mr. Blunte teaching him how to keep a secret but it quickly becomes drinking and dancing downtown at The Garden, at The Dance, and all the drag queens calling him their baby, and one-night stands, and his slipping grades, and throwing up all over a professor’s wife’s hand-darned drapes, the ones on the window that overlook the university square, but that isn’t entirely Eren’s fault, he was bent over the arm of the loveseat with his pants down and he had too much to drink, and Dr. Shadis was trying so hard to compensate for his sad size with a clammy, frantic velocity, it just shook all the gin right out of him. No wonder his wife isn’t interested anymore, no offense.

“Sorry about the drapes,” Eren mumbles, laughing sheepishly as he leaves through the kitchen door, throwing his scarf around his throat. And Dr. Shadis looks like he’s looking at the devil himself as he replies miserably, “Turn in your final paper, I’ll pass you, but—please—for the love of God, don’t come to class again. I don’t want to see you anymore.”

Eren has never felt more in control in his life.

The drag queens say, “Baby, you should charge.” So Eren starts to charge and now he is an effigy to sodomize, a body in which to bury destructive desires, one randy shove at a time.

_Why do you do this?_

He doesn’t know. Maybe he’s broken.

A feisty, beautiful young man with a denim jacket and an unstyled, finger-combed, sort of grown-out ash-blond bad boy coiffure shouts over the live music in a hazy cabaret, “I’m Jean. I want to buy you a drink.”

“I’m a little more expensive than that,” Eren shouts back, blowing cigarette smoke Jean’s way as he leans forward on the bar. “Sorry, handsome.”

“No—” Jean’s eyes flash. “Like, as your date.”

Eren almost drops his cigarette in the watery whiskey at the bottom of his glass.

Dating is bad for business, but Eren lets Jean buy him a drink. Again, and again. Two weeks later, Jean takes him for a joyride on his Harley. It ends with frantic fumbling sex in Jean’s dormitory, across campus from Eren’s, while panty raiders are too busy breaking windows to protest parietal curfews and other rules to notice. Or maybe that’s where it officially starts—because it certainly does not stop.

Eren wouldn’t call himself a devout Catholic or anything like that, but he does believe in God, and the way oppressive ideology can inspire defiance and rebellion, and the sanctity of confessional.

Motel beds are sort of like confessional booths—and if motel beds are confessional booths, then he is the little priest of pleasure, prescribing all the Hail Marys his clients can possibly handle.

But sometimes someone really manhandles him, or threatens him in a Pioneer Square alley, or talks him into something particularly degrading—like that one client who begged Eren to call him “Daddy” until he came, or the one that cracked Eren’s ribs, or the one that left him bound up with a pair of nylons knotted so tight he couldn’t yank free of the bedframe, but thank God they were nylons in the end because the motel staff sure seemed to believe it when he lied with a nervous laugh, “My gal was a little feisty last night, can you help?”

For the most part, what happens in confessional stays in the rented, wrinkled sheets of confessional. Eren swallows secrets whole (or, you know, in spastic bursts).

But he’s a prostitute, not a man of the cloth, and prostitutes don’t have the sacramental seal, so Eren tells Jean about these things and each time Jean seethes, pacing the stretch of his dorm—or the living room of the new apartment, past the windows hung with curtains from Eren’s Grandmama, Jean’s mother’s quilt on the sofa, a steamer trunk full of both their book collections standing in as temporary coffee table.

Roughed up or still a little drunk, Eren takes a slow, redemptive drag off his cigarette, breath shivering on his lower lip before he releases it in a long, steady stream of silky gray and looks at Jean without lifting his head because Jean’s bristled and itching for a fight like when he and Reiner and Bert go after anyone who messes with their close friends.

Eren can’t exactly put into words how much Jean hunting down bad clients turns him on.

He edges out through his teeth, “You want to fuck this son of a bitch up?”

Jean grabs his baseball bat.

Jean takes Eren to his parents’ place in Snohomish, on the edge of Blackman Lake, with the rope swing from Jean’s childhood still in the trees, and a garage full of early art projects, a weather vane and a porch swing on which Eren curls up in a cable knit sweater while Jean sits on the porch railing and Mr. Kirschtein sits in his chair, and they smoke and they drink and they talk about family and life until Mrs. Kirschtein comes out saying, “Boys, if you don’t go to bed now, you’ll never get up in the morning.”

“Why do you let me do any of that, huh?” Eren snarls one night in Snohomish, in the boathouse at the edge of Jean’s parents’ yard, and they’re arguing out here because Eren is really almost too drunk to function and Jean doesn’t want to wake his parents up. “What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with _me_?”

Something flashes in Jean’s eyes. Look at him, all frazzled and not exactly sober himself, hunched into his coat with a cigarette hanging off his lower lip. He fires back cavalierly, “My mother didn’t raise a selfish man. The whole world loves you, so if I’m the one you come home to, I’m the one you come crying to… Well, who am I to control the nature of a storm, huh?” The moonlight chases him through the shadows as he backs Eren up into the corner where the boathouse doors open on the lake. “I wouldn’t wish loving you on anyone,” he hisses, voice jagged. “And yet I’d destroy any lousy son of a bitch who stood in my way of you—”

And Eren feels the pinch of betrayal for a moment, but just a moment, because hanging between them in the chilly night air, those words are not a denunciation, they are not resentment, they are a confession. It shouldn’t move him, but it does. Jean shouldn’t love him, but he does. Eren throws his arms around him, and Jean drags him closer, hand closing on the back of his neck as he kisses him, hard. His hands flirt with the hem of Eren’s school sweater.

“I love you,” Jean blurts, and Eren is in a daze. He has never heard someone use those words and not sound like they’re lying—except for his mother and father, of course, but as of late he’s doubting the integrity of that much, too.

“I love you,” Eren whispers back, desperately, breathlessly, interrupting Jean’s rather tipsy, rather one-sided necking. _I love you_. There is no “too” because it’s not an exchange. They are colliding. One solemn oath is hurled against the other, sparking together like chips of flint, the claims exist on their own and so “too” does nothing to alter the meaning. Love is the ugly truth in him that Jean sees as beautiful, maybe that’s what it is, maybe that’s all right.

Maybe he’s not broken.

Eren doesn’t know.

Maybe he doesn’t know because he’s never been whole in the first place. But he feels whole enough, sharing body heat with Jean in the Kirschtein runabout, bobbing peacefully in the dark of the boathouse. He feels the universe, he feels forever, he feels—happy.

* * *

**{1956.}**

It’s always like this.

Raw, impassioned, emboldened. Pure, somehow.

But first Levi stares from the bedroom doorway, trying to carve this scene into the walls of his memory—Eren, folded on the bed where Levi rests his head, looking right at home on the floral-patterned coverlet with that mad, heated glint in his eyes, lips parted, fingers curled limply.

Levi husks, “What do you like?”

“What?” Eren’s brow dimples; his sultry look falters a breath or two. He recovers like a pro. “I like whatever you do to me—”

Levi starts to unbutton his shirt. “No. I mean it. What do you like?”

Eren looks mildly betrayed by the question—no, fearful. Like it’s dangerous. He doesn’t answer.

Then—it’s the stripping, the pawing, the hungry, open-mouthed kissing and bucking hips. And here is the part of Levi that is normal, at the very least, learned from a soldier that loved him or maybe engrained in his mortal design, the animalistic eagerness to dominate, to penetrate, to conquer, charged with lust and volatile with the pride in delivering the pleasure. Because this is his house, his bed. He runs the show here.

Eren is tight and fever hot inside, and once he opens up completely, Levi starts rolling his hips with a raw fervor, chasing the heat, the pressure. Eren finally answers the question. When he’s trembling, when his nipples are flushed and hard from Levi’s mouth, he moans, “Go slow!” but it breaks down into something raspy and low between a whimper and a groan.

“What?” Levi whispers fiercely.

“Go slow,” Eren says again. “I told you—I love the mechanics of it—I want to feel every inch of you…”

 _Foreign bodies invading my body_.

“Is that what you like?” Levi demands, voice thick with passion.

“Yes—” Eren practically pleads. Something softens his face that is somehow very sad, very fragile and confused, and Levi’s never seen it before but he doesn’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.

It’s like utter, unpracticed surrender— _real_ surrender.

Levi goes slow. It’s torture but he does it. He throbs with every slow, smooth thrust. For a moment he’s distracted—for an instant, he understands what Eren means about feeling every inch. Christ but there’s something maddeningly erotic about it. Eren does a little feline arch-and-shiver below him, blushing and flustered. He utters the most defenseless sounds when Levi drives his hips forward, deep, because Eren’s sex is hot and hard between their bodies and the rhythm crushes him between their bellies.

“Fuck—” Eren’s voice cracks. It’s like he’s talking to himself. “I’m in your bed—I smell you everywhere—I’m in your sheets, I’m in your bed—”

Yes. Yes, he is, and Levi is mad with it.

Eren clings to him. “You look so happy,” he gasps. “You look so happy, are you happy?”

Something in Levi gives way with a snap he feels down to his very bones. He drinks in Eren’s moan and sputters, “I’m sorry, sweetheart—” because he can’t go slow anymore. He aches for release. Desire is ruthless; and need, unforgiving. He slams into Eren at a dizzying pace, until it hurts, until he’s coming and Eren’s biting his own hand to keep quiet as with a frantic grasp Levi milks the orgasm out of him, too.

They both crumble down panting and sticky with sweat, far from intimately tangled on the ruined bed.

Eren pulls his hand from his mouth and a string of spit snaps away from his knuckles. Levi can see clearly the marks on his skin from his own teeth. He is flushed and fragile-looking, brow knotted, tears beading in his lashes. And a verse springs to Levi’s mind, a fragment from Sappho.

 _As on the hills, the men crush underfoot the hyacinth, until the flower purples the ground_.

He rolls over and brushes tousled hair out of Eren’s face so he can press a chapped kiss to his forehead.

* * *

Eren stretches forward on his stomach to light Levi’s cigarette with the smoldering end of his own. He wags a foot, weakly, because he’s kind of sore from the sex—but in a good way, a raw, bruised way. He can still feel the thick heat of Levi inside him if he concentrates long enough on the hot throb of being empty. He thinks about how happy Levi looked, fucking him nice and slow, in his bed, in his sheets, on his pillow, and it makes him blush still.

_Sometimes love is not enough._

Levi lets Eren run his fingers through his hair, humming to the radio music drifting down the short hall from the family room. Eren dusts his lips over Levi’s knuckles. He sticks his cigarette in his mouth and smokes it with no hands as he wiggles Levi’s wedding band off and puts it on his own ring finger.

“Don’t do that,” Levi husks, unmoved either to anger or playfulness. “Put it back, please.”

Eren obeys.

And in that moment, Eren realizes that Levi loves him.

He feels angry, first. Then he feels guilt because he does not understand. Levi certainly knows that love is not Church marriage vows. He loves Levi. He does, in his own way. But that doesn’t mean he knows what to do with Levi’s love.

_Don’t need to pay someone to love me._

Love and sex are two different worlds. They are not to overlap. Unless—

“‘Love must be reinvented,’” Eren breathes, avoiding Levi’s eyes for fear of losing his head with this borrowed revelation.

“Is that so?” Levi humors Eren with a half-listening hum. “Or are you doing that thing again where you quote all the books you read?”

“Yes,” Eren says flatly. It’s the answer to both questions. “Rimbaud. And love is what separates man from the wild—the eloquence of sorrow that is just human taste for destruction at the core.”

“Is that Rimbaud, too?” Bored, Levi taps cigarette ash into the little silver tray and nuzzles into Eren’s palm like a cat as Eren’s fingers keep weakly swirling through his hair.

“No,” Eren whispers. “That’s what I think.”

Eren kisses Levi’s knuckles again. He puts his cigarette down in the ash tray and wanders out into the bathroom to scrub Vaseline off his inner thighs.

“This is the last time,” Levi calls from the bed. His tone of voice betrays it’s not the truth. It’s routine, of course. Eren smiles faintly.

The floor creaks under him as he drifts around the house, sort of in a daze. He runs his fingers along the cabinetry, the light switches, the doors. He feels like a ghost in here, too.

He feels heavy, suddenly.

_Love is not enough._

He feels like this is his fault.

Eren returns to the bedroom where Levi seems to have succumbed to a cat nap. He searches the clothes they’ve strewn every-which-where for his shirt, at the least. He murmurs, “Hey, handsome, tonight’s on me.”

Levi sits up on his elbows sharp enough to knock ash off the end of his cigarette. “What?”

Eren laughs, flashing him a look. He feels like crying. He doesn’t know why. It happens, sometimes. It comes with the profession. “You heard me,” he says, trying to sound like he’s okay. “It’s not pity, trust me. But things get tough, I know. You said so yourself. So carry on and try to have fun in the meantime, right—”

“No.” Levi shakes his head. He rakes a hand through his dark hair, but it just falls back into his eyes and that is God damn attractive, Eren thinks. Levi sits up cross-legged and takes a long drag off his cigarette, saying through the smoke, “No, no, no, that can’t happen, Eren.”

“Why?” Eren snorts.

“Because,” Levi says, gray eyes cutting right through Eren to the dirty secrets of his soul. “That makes this a love affair, not a purchased service.”

Eren’s heart sinks and then jumps to his throat again. He clutches his shirt, balled up in one hand. He feels like he can’t catch his breath. He stands there with the slump of martyrdom sagging down his shoulders, and wearing nothing is not what leaves him feeling so naked.

_You’re mine and I’m yours._

“So be it,” he finally says, unwavering.

Because maybe like pain and pleasure, respectively, love and sex are actually two sides of the same feeling.

_You look so happy—_

Levi stands roughly from the bed, looking Eren over in such a stormy way that Eren is actually a little nervous. Levi shoots forward with a purpose; Eren shrinks back by the bedroom door, lowering his eyes as Levi grabs him by the arm.

Eren cannot understand love in the wake of sex. He feels it—God yes, he feels love, he suffers for love. But he does not know what to do with it like he knows what to do with his body. He doesn’t really deserve it. He’s not sure how to take it and turn it into something he can give back; there is only what he feels and how it burns him alive from the inside like a witch at the stake.

But maybe that lost, bumbling love is a part of himself that deserves not to be eroded or broken like the rest of him.

Levi pins him back against the wall and kisses him like a new form of violence, all the indiscriminate force of affection and need in its purest state, not prettied up by romance and courtship. Eren welcomes the bruise of it. He takes it, he accepts it.

And then he gives in to it with everything he has to offer.

* * *

 _But what can eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?_  

— Baudelaire

 

**{END part deux.}**


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